o. My show is about loss. And, of course…duh…life is starting to imitate it.
I haven’t been ‘blogging’ for a while because the feeling’s been: This sucks. Who wants to hear about all of this crap.
BUT, now, dear friend, family and/or stranger, the crap’s piled up into a neat stack that has transcended mere crap. Now! For a limited time only! I will turn this crap into…Poetry (inspiration, even)!
1. I was walking down off of some BEAUTIFUL rocky mountain or another with one of my bestest friends after the bestest camping by a high desert oasis, thinking, “I really should through this camera over a cliff. I’m not really Seeing. I’m just taking. Pictures.” And so I lose my camera accidently. The Universe supplies the absence that I seek.
2. My Aunt Nancy and I and my brother and sister all took a tour of “The Home.” Those dreaded two words that connote both a leaving and a returning. It’s not as bad as it seems. Aunt Nancy seems to be readying herself for the change…and her struggle, bravery and transparency/openness are so inspiring to me as I wrestle the constant flow of Change on the Road. Also, we never knew it, but she is a poet (we found beautiful, morbid and romantic poems of hers that she wrote like more than 70 years ago. I’ll try to put some up here.
3. I lost my baggage for a week or so. And not metaphorically. United Airlines, or rather their representatives in India, could not find most of my Clown stuff/makeup for five days (during which I was trying to have my one vacation up in the Rocky mountains). I spoke with at least Ten different Indian people and spent almost as much time on the phone and nobody besides ‘Beverly’ (her real name has been changed to protect her from Big Brother) at the Denver airport could interpret the information in their system that said that my stuff had been in Bin Ten. ‘Beverly’ seemed to me like someone trapped (like my stuff was) in a Kafka-esque nightmare. “Help Me! Please!” the super supervisor seemed to say, as she begged me to write to United and ask more workers and better training. SO IRONIC that my show is about losing and rising above that which I am attached to. The Universe’s got a hell of a sense of humor.
Sidenote: Beware of flying with United into Denver. ‘Beverly’ won’t be there very long to help you find your luggage. Soon she’ll be a nurse.
4. So. The Universe’s sense of humor. Here at the Boulder Fringe on Saturday night I was playing to a nearly Sold Out audience that was Eating It Up. I was on Fire. I was improvising all the in-between moments. I had the audience in my hand. And then, like someone punished for their conceit, just as I’m pushing and building towards the Big Payoff (I won’t spoil the show for those of you who haven’t seen it) of my Big Show That I’m Doing so Great…fake tomatoes start appearing on either side of me, rolling one by one from the backstage entrance. 1. Tomatoes aren’t part of my show. 2. Maybe I’ll ignore the tomatoes. 3. The audience isn’t ignoring the tomatoes. 4. I’ll go ask why the tomatoes are coming.
The Tomatoes are coming because I’m OVERTIME? Oh no! I go back onstage and thank everyone for coming and quickly start to take down my set.
BUT WAIT. We’re in a new venue that no one knows about and all of the shows are starting 10 minutes late. So I’m not overtime at all. And I Hate tomatoes! They upset my stomach. It’s all a bad dream. My show is bad dream enough, but the Payoff turns the nightmare okay again. But the tomatoes leave me (and the audience too?) with a surreal sense of anger and loss. Again the Universe takes it upon itself to imitate my art, and with tomatoes there’s an added admonishment that humbles and confuses me. Okay, I know that I’m thinking too old testament that there is no wrathful being up there waiting, just waiting for us to screw up, but lately the loss and the weirdness and the feelings are so intense that it’s becoming poetic and poetry and Gods are the only way to make sense of it…
BUT. The sense that is coming from all of this is not all bad. The tomato person and I have since made up and actually made a little cross publicity stunt (involving a smooshed tomato in the face) out of the whole thing at the late night
Cabaret.
And I’m glad to have lost my camera. The place where we camped up in the Rockies was simply the most gorgeous place in the world and photos just box, crop and flatten. There were moments up on that mountain, talking with my friend Sarah and her cousin that made all of it (unaided by illegal substances) congeal into a big blob of beauty. The Stars. And my Big Realization (which so many have had before), that the universe is one body. One entity. And inside my body: one universe. No separation. Cause and effect, sure. Wars, famine, birth, love and confusion, sure. But it wasn’t till I could see the stars from up here (and perhaps the lack of oxygen helped too) that I could see what has always been there.
And the baggage. Am I glad to have lost the baggage, temporarily? No. That sucked.
And my Aunt Nancy. I’ll never lose her. And all of this change in her life is spurring a little of a change in my family’s life. We’re starting to email each other and call a little more often. And what with my being on the road, I could use that.
One of the pictures on my camera that I lost was a picture that I really wanted to show Aunt Nancy. It’s of a giant Scrabble board in Toronto. Once a month they’ve a pedestrian only market area and when I went, a whole crowd was surrounding a scrabble board bigger than any bed I’ve seen, with tiles that where each the size of a normal sized scrabble board. In these dimensions the game became a spectator sport, with the crowd yelling out words and free agents walking from player to player whispering amazing words into their ears. It was a little hard to (when I played) see the whole board, but then again I had the whole crowd behind me and that free agent (who, as it occurs to me now, must be that guardian angle that my Aunt has hanging around me, making sure that I lose (and find) the right stuff. Thank you, Aunt Nancy. �
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